Adrian
Scott
"How do we scale up the number of quality human relationships
one person can sustain by many orders of magnitude? In an increasingly
connected world, how does one person interact with a hundred
thousand, a million or even a billion people?"

Esther
Dyson ""
When is it time to stop calculating risk and rewards, and just
go ahead and do what you know is right?"

Howard
Gardner "In
view of globalization, which is here to stay, and the events
of September 11and its aftermath, which were a shock to most
of us, do we need to make fundamental changes in our educational
goals and methods?"

Leon
Lederman
"Is it conceivable that the standard curriculum in science
and math, crafted in 1893, will still be maintained in the 26,000
high schools of this great nation?"

Piet
Hut "Could
our lack of theoretical insight in some of the most basic questions
in biology in general, and consciousness in particular, be related
to us having missed a third aspect of reality, which upon discovery
will be seen to always have been there, equally ordinary as
space and time, but so far somehow overlooked in scientific
descriptions?"

"A
site that has raised electronic discourse on the Web to a whole
new level.... Genuine learning seems to be going on here."
 Atlantic

1999

"What
Is The Most Important Invention In The Past Two Thousand Years?"

"...Thoughtful and often surprising
answers ....a fascinating survey of intellectual and creative
wonders of the world ..... Reading them reminds me of how wondrous
our world is." Bill Gates,
New York Times Syndicated Column

2000

"What
Is Today's Most Important Unreported Story?"

"Don't
assume for a second that Ted Koppel, Charlie Rose and the editorial
high command at the New York Times have a handle on all
the pressing issues of the day.... a lengthy list of profound,
esoteric and outright entertaining responses.  San Jose
Mercury News ("Web Site for Intellectuals Inspires Serious
Thinking")

2001

"What
Questions Have Disappeared?"

"Responses
to this year's question are deliciously creative... the variety
astonishes. Edge continues to launch intellectual skyrockets
of stunning brilliance. Nobody in the world is doing what Edge
is doing." (Arts & Letters Daily)

"I
can repeat the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?"

2002

The
5th Annual Edge Question reflects the spirit of the Edge
motto: "To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge,
seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them
in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions
they are asking themselves."

The
2002 Edge Question is:

"WHAT
IS YOUR QUESTION? ... WHY?"

I
have asked Edge contributors for "hard-edge"
questions, derived from empirical results or experience specific
to their expertise, that render visible the deeper meanings
of our lives, redefine who and what we are. The goal is a series
of interrogatives in which "thinking smart prevails over
the anaesthesiology of wisdom."

Read
and print individual responses to the Edge Question, which
are linked to the excerpts below. and presented in the order of
most recent first. Or, click on the "Printer
version", for a large file containing the complete book-length
text of responses to date.

THOSE
WHO DON'T ASK REMAIN DUMB
The haze of ignorance still has not disappeared: Whoever wants
real answers has to know what he's looking for  A poll
of scientists and artists for the year 2002.

In
a time when culture was still not numbered, the Count of Thüringen
invited his nobles to the "Singers' War at the Wartburg,"
where he asked questions (if we are to believe Richard Wagner)
that would bring glory, the most famous of which queried, "Could
you explain to me the nature of love?" The publisher and
literary agent, John Brockman, who now organizes singers' wars
on the Internet, enjoys latching on to this tradition at the beginning
of every year. (FAZ, January 9, 2001). His Tannhäuser
may be named Steven Pinker, and his Wolfram von Eschenbach may
go by Richard Dawkins, but it would do us well to trust that they
and their compatriots could also turn out speculation on the count's
favorite theme. Brockman's thinkers of the "Third Culture,"
whether they, like Dawkins, study evolutionary biology at Oxford
or, like Alan Alda, portray scientists on Broadway, know no taboos.
Everything is permitted, and nothing is excluded from this intellectual
game. But in the end, as it takes place in its own Wartburg, reached
electronically at www.edge.org, it concerns us and our unexplained
and evidently inexplicable fate. In this new year Brockman himself
doesn't ask, but rather once again facilitates the asking of questions.
The contributions can be found from today onwards on the Internet.
In conjunction with the start of the forum we are printing a selection
of questions and commentary, at times in somewhat abridged form,
in German translation. .... [click
here]

Women of a previous generation said that their own
mothers had missed out on the fruits of feminism.....[click
here]

Tracy
Quanis a member of the International Network
of Sex Work Projects. She is the author of the novel, Diary
of a Manhattan Call Girl.

"How
do we scale up the number of quality human relationships one person
can sustain by many orders of magnitude? In an increasingly connected
world, how does one person interact with a hundred thousand, a
million or even a billion people?"

Our
one fixed resource is time  human attention. As we become
increasingly networked in the technological sense, we also become
more networked in the social sense.....[click
here]

Adrian
Scottis founder of Ryze, a business networking
community. He is a founding investor in Napster, got his Ph.D.
in nonlinear optimization at age 20, and has sung with Placido
Domingo and performed with the NYC Ballet.

"Why
is life so full of suffering?"

It is a bit embarrassing to admit a preoccupation with this gigantic
old question, but it is human, I suppose.....[click
here]

Randolph
M. Nesse is Professor of Psychiatry and Professor
of Psychology at the University of Michigan and editor of Evolution
and the Capacity for Commitment.

Who
am I? What am I?

Perhaps I am this stuff here, i.e., the ordered and chaotic
collection of molecules that comprise my body and brain. ....[click
here]

Ray
Kurzweilwas
the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character
recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the
blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, among other major inventions,
and author of The Age of Spiritual Machines.

"What
is value?"

Oscar Wilde once said that "A fool is someone who knows the
price of everything and the value of nothing"....[click
here]

J.
Doyne Farmer, one of the pioneers of what has come to be called
chaos theory, is McKinsey Professor, Sante Fe, Institute, and
the co-founder and former co-president of Prediction Company in
Santa Fe, New Mexico.

"Are
we ever going to be humble enough to assume that we are mere animals,
like crabs, penguins, and chimpanzees, and not the chosen protégés
of this or that God?"

Recent events around the world remind us of historical phenomena
observed since the dawn of civilizations: wars, genocides, oppression,
conquests, occupations, and, of course, killings in the name of
some God.....[click
here]

Rafael
Núñez is professor of Cognitive Science
at the University of California at San Diego, and author of Where
Mathematics Comes From (with George Lakoff).

"Are
space and time fundamental concepts or are they approximations
to other, more subtle, ideas that still await our discovery?"

It is hard to conceive of a universe that does not exist in space
and persist through time: space and time seem to be the basic
framework of the cosmos. ....[click
here]

Brian
Greene isa
professor of physics and of mathematics at Columbia University
and author
of The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and
the Quest for an Ultimate Theory.

"Is
it possible to know what is good and what is evil?"

For the past four centuries, the attempt to answer this question
has been the main driving force of world history ­ not only
the history of ideas, but also the history of politics and collective
violence. This is true for two reasons: ....[click
here]

James
Gilliganhas been
on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at the Harvard
Medical School since 1966. He is the author of Violence: Reflections
on a National Epidemic.

"
Does life on Earth have a future?"

By "life on Earth" I mean the variety of life, the multitude
of species, the dazzling array of ecosystems they create from
the permanent snow fields of the Himalayas to steamy jungles,
and coral reefs, and the variety of including ourselves including
and the 6000+ languages we speak and our cultures that they largely
define. ....[click
here]

Stuart
Pimm is Professor of Conservation Biology at Columbia
University in New Yorkand author of The World According to
Pimm: A Scientist Audits the Earth.

"Is
the PC desktop really dead?"

Much ado has been made lately over the problems of the PC "desktop
metaphor," the system of folders and icons included in Macintosh
and Windows PCs....[click
here]

Mark
Hurst is the founder of Creative Good, Inc., a
leading user experience consulting firm.

"How do women's minds work?"

Try this question on any man: All you'll get for an answer is
a shrugging of shoulders along with a puzzled facial expression.....[click
here]

"What
will happen when the increasing speed of communication, the driving
force behind cultural progress since the introduction of husbandry,
suddenly becomes irrelevant?"

I
am convinced that there is a predominant driving force behind
cultural progress and that this driving force is speed of communications.....[click
here]

Eberhard
Zanggeris the geoarchaeologist who uncovered the
most plausible explanation for the legend of lost Atlantis of
the past 2500 years and author of The Future of the Past.

"Will
unification ever come to a stop?"

Unification of opposites is an underlying theme in the development
of humanity.....[click
here]

Anton
Zeilinger
is a Professor of Physics at the University of Vienna whose work
in quantum teleportation has received worldwide attention.

"Why
do we decorate?"

Why do all the human cultures that we know of decorate things?
Why not just leave them alone? Why put in all that extra, and
apparently non-functional, energy? ....[click
here]

Brian
Eno,an artist, makes and produces records. He
has produced U2 ("including this year's award- winning "All
That You Can't Leave Behind"), Talking Heads and Devo and
collaborated with David Bowie, John Cale, and Laurie Anderson.

"Why
do people like music?"

People from every culture like listening to some kind of music,
so it seems that it is something that is wired into us. Is there
an evolutionary advantage to liking music?....[click
here]

W.
Daniel Hillisis
Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Applied Minds, Inc.,
a research and development company and author of The
Pattern on the Stone.

"How
much can we expect the social sciences to help build a just and
free society?"

Marx and Engels argued for "scientific socialism", that is, for
a political movement that would bring about a just and free society
with the help of science. ....[click
here]

Dan
Sperberis a social and cognitive
scientist at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
(CNRS) in Paris and author, with Deirdre Wilson, of Relevance:
Communication and Cognition.

"What
is the difference between the sigmundoscope and the sigmoidoscope?
Less cryptically, how is everyday narrative logic different
from extensional mathematical logic?

It differs in countless ways, most of them poorly understood.....[click
here]

John
Allen Paulos is Professor of mathematics at Temple
University adjunct professor of journalism at Columbia University,
and author Once Upon a Number.

"Why
do people kill other people?"

No offense against another human being inflicts greater costs
than killing....[click
here]

David
M. Buss is Professor of Psychology at the University
of Texas, Austin, and author of Evolutionary Psychology: The
New Science of the Mind.

"Why
bother? Or: Why do we go further and explore new stuff?"

Many human skills enable an individual to do something with less
physiological effort....[click
here]

Tor
Nørretranders
is a science writer, consultant, lecturer and organizer based
in Copenhagen, Denmark and author of The User Illusion: Cutting
Consciousness Down to Size.

"Are
space, time, and all other physical quantities only relational?"

What do we actually know about the physical world after the scientific
revolution of the last century? ....[click
here]

Carlo
Rovelliis
a theoretical physicist at the Centre de Physique Theorique in
Marseille, France.

"Is
there, or should we expect, a fracture in the logical basis on which
people now look for a description of the nexus between particle
physics and cosmology?"

Since the 1930s, we have had to live with Godel's theorem 
the apparently unshaken proof by the logician Kurt Godel that there
can be no system of mathematical logic that is at once consistent
(or free from contradictions) and complete (in the sense of being
comprehensive)....[click
here]

Sir
John Maddoxwho
recently retired having served 23 years as the editor of Nature,
is a trained physicist, and author of What Remains to be Discovered:
The Agenda for Science in the Next Century.

"What
Is Real?"

The question of what is "real," defined here as the physical universe,
acquires special subtlety from the perspective of brain and cognitive
science....[click
here]

Robert
R. Provine
is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University
of Maryland and author of Laughter: A Scientific Investigation.

"Can
democracy survive complexity?"

As any parent of adolescents has probably experienced, life has
become sufficiently complex that emotional maturity by the end
of teen years is a thing of the distant past....[click
here]

Stephen
H. Schneider
is Professor in the Biological Sciences Department at Stanford
University and author of Laboratory Earth.

"How
different could minds be?"

Plato believed that human knowledge was inborn. Kant and Peirce
agreed that much of knowledge had to exist prior to birth or it
would be impossible to understand or learn anything....[click
here]

Richard
Nisbettis Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of the Culture and
Cognition Program at the University and author numerous books.

"The
hows and whys of what led to us"

There are, it seems to me, just two fundamental scientific questions
that, for very different reasons, we may have no possibility of
answering with any certainty.....[click
here]

Keith
Devlin, mathematician, is a Senior Researcher at
Stanford University, and author ot The Math Gene.

"When
is it time to stop calculating risk and rewards, and just go ahead
and do what you know is right?"

In
the world we live in, mathematicians and investors have become
ever better at calculating risks, assessing outcomes, laying out
possible scenarios.....[click
here]

Esther
Dysonis
president of EDventure Holdings and editor of the computer-industry
newsletter, Release 1.0, and author of the book, Release
2.1: A Design for Living in the Digital Age.

"In view of globalization, which
is here to stay, and the events of September 11and its aftermath,
which were a shock to most of us, do we need to make fundamental
changes in our educational goals and methods?"

Precollegiate education has been remarkably consistent over the
decades: literacy in the primary years, initial mastery of a few
major subject areas (math, science, history, language, perhaps
in the arts) in middle and secondary school....[click
here]

Howard
Gardner is Professor of Cognition and Education
at Harvard University at the co-author (with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
and William Damon) of Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics
Meet.

"Is
it conceivable that the standard curriculum in science and math,
crafted in 1893, will still be maintained in the 26,000 high schools
of this great nation?"

Leon
M. Lederman, the director emeritus of Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory, has received the Wolf Prize in Physics,
and the Nobel Prize in Physics. He is the author (with Dick Teresi)
of The God Particle.

If, as Harold Bloom puts it, Shakespeare invented the modern soul,
if we are the way we are because Shakespeare existed as a writer,
the question arises, whether this historic progression has come
to an end and will soon be replaced by a new version of 21st century
souls. ....[click
here]

"Is
God nothing more than a sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrial
intelligence?"

This question is based on what I call, tongue in cheek, "Shermer's
Last Law," that any sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrial
intelligence is indistinguishable from God....[click
here]

Michael
Shermer is the founding Publisher of Skeptic
magazine and the author of The Borderlands of Science.

"Can
wealth be distributed?"

Even with productivity showing startling increases as a consequence
of new information technologies everything suggests that the gap
between rich and poor is growing dramatically globally and even
beginning to increase again in the U.S. So much for trickle down
economics.....[click
here]

John
Markoffcovers
the computer industry and technology for The New York Times
and is co-author of Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America's
Most Wanted Computer Outlaw (with Tsutomu Shimomura).

"Is
the universe a quantum computer?"

The universe is quantum mechanical, and its dynamics can be
simulated precisely and efficiently using quantum information
processing....[click
here]

Seth
Lloyd
is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and
a principal investigator at the Research Laboratory of Electronics.

"Why
do we continue to act as if the universe were constructed from
nouns linked by verbs, when we know it is really constructed from
verbs linked by nouns?"

My question is to do with materialism, reductionism and the inertia
of intellectual progress....[click
here]

Steve
Grand isan
aritifical life researcher and creator of Lucy, a robot babay
orangutan. He is the author of Creation: Life and How to Make
It.

"How
can a small number of genes build a complex mental machine?"

John McCarthy and I are from different generations (in the semester
before McCarthy invented Lisp, he taught my dad FORTRAN, using
punch cards on an old IBM) but our questions are nearly the same.
McCarthy asks "how are behaviors encoded in DNA"?...[click here]

Response
to Paul Davies' reply to John McCarthy

It is hard indeed to imagine that nature would endow an organism
with anything as detailed as The Cambridge Star Atlas.....[click
here]

Gary
F. Marcus is a cognitive scientist at New York
University and author of The Algebraic Mind.

"What
is the pertinent question?"

Surely, the right question it is not what was wrong before Sept.11th.
....[click here]

Eduardo
Punset is Director and Producer of "Networks,"
a weekly programme of Spanish public television on Science and
author of A Field Guide to Survive in the XXI st Century.

"Do
wormholes exist?"
Two startling ideas about wholly different classes of objects
emerged from general relativity: black holes and wormholes. ....[click
here]

Gregory
Benford is a professor of physics and astronomy
at the University of California, Irvine. His most recent nonfiction
is Deep Time.

"Why
is beauty making a comeback now?"

My hypothesis is that the modernist/post-modernist idea that beauty
is a social construct (with no deep bedrock in reality) is dead.....[click
here]

Joel
Garreauis
the cultural revolution correspondent of The Washington Post and
author of Edge City.

"How
are moral assertions connected with the world of facts?"

Unlike many ancient philosophical problems, this one has, paradoxically,
been made both more urgent and less tractable by the gradual triumph
of scientific rationality. ....[click
here]

David
Deutsch,a physicist, is a member of the Centre
for Quantum Computation at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford University,
and author of The Fabric of Reality.

"How
different could life have been?"

Physicists, including several in this group, are fond of asking,
What if the universe had been different? ....[click
here]

Reply to Paul Daviess response
to John McCarthy

Paul Davies notes that some night-migrating birds navigate by
the stars, and asks whether avian DNA contains a map of the sky.....[click
here]

Richard
Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and the Charles
Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford University.
He is the author of Unweaving the Rainbow.

"Can
we ever escape our past, or are we doomed to a future of biobabble?"

In
mid-November 1999, New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead published a
commentary on the candidacy of Al Gore, and in it she gave us
a new word. ....[click
here]

Milford
H. Wolpoff is Professor of Anthropology at the
University of Michigan and author (with Rachel Caspari) of
Race and Human Evolution: A Fatal Attraction.

"Are
the laws of nature a form of computer code that needs and uses
error
correction?"

...[click
here]John
D. Barrow is
Research Professor of Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge
and author of Between
Inner Space and Outer Space.

"Why
do we fear the wrong things?"

A
mountain of research shows that our fears modestly correlate with
reality. ....[click
here]

David
G. Myers is a social psychologist at Hope College
(Michigan) and author of The Pursuit of Happiness.

"Would
an extra-terrestrial civilization develop the same mathematics
as ours? If not, how could theirs possibly be different?"

In writing my next book, about maths, I have been led to ponder
this question by the fact that there are philosophers, and a few
mathematicians, who believe that it is conceivable that there
could be intelligences with a fully developed mathematics that
does not, for example, recognize the integers or the primes, let
alone Fermat's Last Theorem or the Riemann Hypothesis.....[click
here]

Karl
Sabbagh
is a writer and television producer and author of A Rum Affair:
A True Story of Botanical Fraud.

"Is
the universe really expanding? Or: Did Einstein get it exactly
right?"

As
I prepare to head for Cambridge (the Brits' one) for the conference
to mark Stephen Hawking's 60th birthday, I know that the suggestion
I am just about to make will strike the great and the good who
are assembling for the event as my scientific suicide note. ....[click
here] Julian Barbour
is an independent theoretical physicist and author of The End
of Time.

Could
our lack of theoretical insight in some of the most basic questions
in biology in general, and consciousness in particular, be related
to us having missed a third aspect of reality, which upon discovery
will be seen to always have been there, equally ordinary as space
and time, but so far somehow overlooked in scientific descriptions?

Is the arena of physics, constructed out of space and time with
matter/energy tightly interwoven with space and time, sufficient
to fully describe all of our material world? ....[click
here]

Piet
Hut,professor of
astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton,
is involved in the project of building GRAPEs, the world's fastest
special-purpose computers,

John
R. Skoyles is a researcher in the evolution of
human intelligence in the light of recent discoveries about the
brain, who, while a first-year student at LSE, published a theory
of the origins of Western Civilization in Nature.

"Why
doesn't conservation click?"

Three decades ago I began my first career working on a British
television series called "Survival". ....[click
here]

Delta
Willis has searched for fossils alongside Meave
and Richard Leakey, profiled physicists and paleontologists who
draw inspiration from nature, and serves as chief contributor
to the Fodor's Guide to Kenya & Tanzania.

"What
is time, and what is the right language to describe change, in
a closed system like the universe, which contains all of its observers?"

This
is, I believe, the key question on which the quantum theory of
gravity and our understanding of cosmology, depends. ....[click
here]

Lee
Smolin, a theoretical physicist, is a founding
member and research physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo
Canada author of Three Roads to Quantum Gravity.

"What
is the nature of fads, fashions, crazes, and financial manias?
Do they share a structure that can in turn be found at the core
of more substantial changes in a culture? In other words, is there
an engine of change to be found in the simple fad that can explain
and possibly predict or accelerate broader changes that we regard
as less trivial than "mere" fads? And more importantly, can we
quantify the workings of this engine if we decide that it exists?"

I have shelves of books and papers by smart people who have brushed
up against the edge of this question but who have seldom attacked
it head on.....[click
here]

Alan
Alda, an actor, writer and director, is currently
playing Richard Feynman in the stage play QED at Lincoln Center
in New York.

"If
the medium is indeed the message, does (or can) the message define
the medium?"

(As
a poet, I don't think I need to explicate the question.) .....[click
here]

Gerd Sternis
a poet, media artist and cheese maven and the author of an oral
history From Beat Scene Poet to Psychedelic Multimedia Artist
1948-1978.

"Will
humankind be able to use its growing self-knowledge to overcome
the biologically programmed instincts that could otherwise destroy
it?"

I am intrigued by the interplay between the following: 1) People
always want a little bit more than they have.....[click
here]

Chris
Anderson
is the incoming Chairman and Host of the TED Conference (Technology,
Education, Design) held each February in Monterey, California
and formerly a magazine publisher (Future Publishing).

"What
is the nature of learning?"

That
question strikes me as being as infinitely perplexing and personal
as, What's the meaning of life?....[click
here]

Todd
Siler
is the founder and director of Psi-Phi Communications and author
of Think Like A Genius.

"Where
Are They?"

When Enrico Fermi asked his famous question (now known as the
Fermi Paradox) more than fifty years ago  if there is
advanced extraterrestrial life, intelligence, and technology,
why don't we see unmistakable evidence of it?  it was the
era of 60-megaton atmospheric bomb tests and broadcast television,
with unlimited fusion power in plain sight. ....[click
here]

George
Dyson is a
historian among futurists and the author of Darwin Among the
Machines.

"How
can we understand the fact that such complex and precise mathematical
relations inhere in nature?"

Of course this is one of the oldest philosophical questions in
science but still one of the most mysterious.....[click
here]

Margaret
Wertheimis
a science writer and commentator and the author of The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante
to the Internet.

"How
will people think about the soul?"

Cognitive scientists believe that emotions, memories, and consciousness
are the result of physical processes. ....[click
here]

Paul
Bloom is Professor of Psychology at Yale and author
of How Children Learn the Meanings of Words (Learning, Development,
and Conceptual Change).

We need to sleep every day. Why do we spend a third of our lives
in a dormant state? ....[click
here]

Terrence
Sejnowski,
a computational neurobiologist and Professor at the Salk Institute
for Biological Studies, is a coauthor of Thalamocortical Assemblies:
How Ion Channels, Single Neurons and Large-Scale Networks Organize
Sleep Oscillations.

"What
are minds, that they are both essentially mental yet inextricably
intertwined with body (and world)?"

We thought we had this one nailed. Believing (rightly) that the
physical world is all there is, the sciences of the mind re-invented
thought and reason (and feeling) as information-processing events
in the human brain. ....[click
here]

Andy
Clark
is Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the University
of Sussex, UK and the author of Being There: Putting Brain,
Body and World Together Again.

"Is
humanity in the midst of a cognitive 'Fourth-Transition?' Or,
why doesn't the Encyclopedia Brittanica matter any more?"

It feels to me like something very important is going on. ....[click
here]

Mark
Stahlman,
a venture capitalist who has been focused on next generation computer/networking
platforms, is co-founder the Newmedia Laboratory, NYNMA.

"What's
the neurobiology of doing good and being good?"

I've spent most of my career as a neurobiologist working on an
area of the brain called the hippocampus. ....[click
here]

Robert
Sapolsky is a professor of biological sciences
at Stanford University and author of A Primate's Memoir.

"Do
we want to live in one world, or two?"

One
of the great achievements of recent history has been a dramatic
reduction in absolute poverty in the world. ....[click
here]

Lance
Knobel is Adviser, Prime Minister's Forward Strategy
Unit, London, and the former head of the program of the World
Economic Forums' Annual meeting in Davos.

"Why
am I me?"

This question was asked by my eight-year-old grandson George.
In eight letters it summarizes the conundrum of personal existence
in an impersonal universe.....[click
here]

Freeman
Dyson is professor of physics at the Institute
for Advanced Study and author of The Sun, the Genome, and the
Internet.

"How
much can we handle?"

We've
got fundamental scientific theories (such as quantum theory and
relativity) that test out superbly, even if we don't quite know
how they all fit into a whole, but we're hung up trying to understand
complicated phenomena, like living things. How much complexity
can we handle?....[click
here]

Jaron
Lanier, computer scientist and musician, is currently
the lead scientist for the National Tele-Immersion Initiative.

"Was
there any choice in the creation of the Universe?"

Here I paraphrase Einstein's famous question: "Did God have any
choice in the creation of the Universe". ....[click
here]

Lawrence
Krauss is Professor of Physics at Case Western
Reserve University and the author of Atom.

"Is
technology going to 'wake up' or 'come alive' anytime in the future?"

Bill Joy, the prominent computer scientist, argued in a Wired
article last year that "the future doesn't need us"
because other creatures, artificial or just post-human, are going
to take over the world in the 21st century. ....[click
here]

Robert
Aunger is an evolutionary theorist and editor
of Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science.

"Do
the benefits accruing to humankind (leaving aside questions of
afterlife) from the belief and practice of organized religions
outweigh the costs?"

Given
the political sensitivities of the topic, it is hard to imagine
that a suitably rigorous attempt to answer this question could
be organized or its results published and discussed soberly, but
it is striking that there is no serious basis on which to conduct
such a conversation.....[click
here]

James
J. O'Donnellis Professor
of Classical Studies and Vice Provost at UPenn and author of Avatars
of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace.

"What
does it mean to have an educated mind in the 21st century?"

While education is on every politician's agenda as an item of
serious importance, it is astonishing that the notion of what
it means to be educated never seems to come up.....[click
here]

Roger
Schank is Distinguished Career Professor,
School of Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon University and author of Virtual
Learning: A Revolutionary Approach to Building a Highly Skilled
Workforce.

"How
will the sciences of the mind constrain our theories and policies
of education?"

In several recent meetings that I have attended, I have been overwhelmed
by the rift between what the sciences of mind, brain and behavior
have uncovered over the past decade, and both how and what science
educators teach.....[click
here]

Marc
D. Hauser is an evolutionary psychologist, a professor
at Harvard University and author of Wild Minds: What AnimalsThink.

"Is
morality relative or absolute?"

Humans spread out from a common origin into many different global
environments....[click
here]

Timothy
Taylor is an archaeologist at University of Bradford,
UK, and author of The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years
of Human Sexual Culture.

"Eureka:
What makes coherence so important to us?"

When something is missing, it bothers us that things don't hang
together.....[click
here]

William
Calvin
is a theoretical neurobiologist at the University of Washington
and author of How Brains Think.

Douglas
Rushkoff
is a Professor of Media Culture at New York University's Interactive
Telecommu-nications Program and author of Coercion: Why We
Listen to What "They" Say.

"How
are behaviors encoded in DNA?"

Many animals have quite substantial hereditary behavior. Moreover,
these behaviors are subject to evolution on fairly short time
scales, so they probably have straightforward DNA encodings on
which mutations can act. Mostly the behaviors seem to be sequences
of actions, but perhaps there are some of the form "do X
until Y is true".....[click
here]

John
McCarthy is
Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University.

Clifford
A. Pickover
is a researcher at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center and author
of The Paradox of God and the Science of Omniscience.

"'To be or not to be' remains
the question"

The fact is that is "To be or not to be" is both a simple,
perhaps the simplest, and a complex question, the hardest to sustain,
let alone to ask.....[click
here]

Derrick
de Kerckhove is Director of the McLuhan Program
at the University of Toronto and author of Connected Intelligence.

"What
kind of system of 'coding' of semantic information does the brain
use?"

My question now is actually a version of the question I was asking
myself in the first year, and I must confess that I've had very
little time to address it properly in the intervening years, since
I've been preoccupied with other, more tractable issues. ....[click
here]

We all take for granted the fact that human beings ask questions
and seek explanations, and that the questions they ask go far
beyond their immediate practical concerns. ....[click
here]

Alison
Gopnik
is a professor of psychology at the University of California at
Berkeley and coauthor of The Scientist
In The Crib.

"What
must a physical system be to be able to act on its own behalf?"

In or ordinary life, we ascribe action and doing to other humans,
and lower organisms, even bacteria swimming up a glucose gradient
to get food. ....[click
here]

Stuart
A. Kauffman, an emeritus professor of biochemistry
at UPenn, is a theoretical biologist and author of Investigations.

"Universe
or multiverse, that is the question?"

Of late, it is fashionable among leading physicists and cosmologists
to suppose that alongside the physical world we see lies a stupendous
array of alternative realities, some resembling our universe,
others very different.....[click
here]

Paul
Davies, a
physicist, writer and broadcaster, now based in South Australia,
is author of How to Build a Time Machine.

"What
is your heresy?"

I've noticed that the more scientifically educated a person is,
the more likely they will harbor a quiet heresy. ....[click
here]

Kevin
Kelly is Editor-At-Large for Wired
Magazine and author of
New Rules for the New Economy.